Looking back on salient historical texts largely based on self-socioanalysis and with regard to current developments in sociology and linguistics, the concepts of lived experience of language and the creative multimodal approach of the language portrait are located within the broad and heterogeneous field of biographical research.
Link to the video including captions: https://www.uni-due.de/germanistik/purkarthofer/videos
The title 'This is not an autobiography' refers to the obvious insight that what we deal with in (auto-)biographically oriented research is not the (linguistic) life trajectory of a person as such but the narrative representations of moments of lived experience of language. The objective of biographical reflection on language practices is, in my understanding, not to sketch out a coherent life history but rather a sort of self-socioanalysis (Bourdieu 2002) interested in processes of subjectivation and in the constitution of bodily and emotional dispositions shaped by underlying inequalities and social power relations.
In my contribution I will focus on narratives of particular moments of lived experience of language that can appear in the form of autoethnographic vignettes in academic texts. Drawing on Roland Barthes' (1964) semiotic analysis of illustrative vignettes in a historical encyclopedia and on Alfred Lorenzer's (2006) conceptualization of scenic understanding, I suggest to comprehend autoethnographic vignettes as representations of condensed scenes that remain to some extent polysemic and polyvalent. As far as they can resonate on a bodily-emotional, experiential level with the reader, their function is beyond the merely illustrative. Scenic approaches in the literary genre – and also in academic writing – that do not follow the pattern of the traditional Bildungsroman, of a coherent life story, are gaining in importance. The French writer Annie Ernaux describes her writing as "less autobiographical than auto-socio-biographical". She sees the main aim of this form of writing in understanding the social fabric through exploring lived experience and in understanding accounts of lived experience as a reflection of and response to social power relations and social changes.
Barthes, R. (1964/1980). The Plates of the Encyclopedia. In R. Barthes (Ed.), New critical essays (pp. 23–39). New York: Hill and Wang.
Bourdieu, P. (1979). L'illusion biographique. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 62/63, 69–72.
Ernaux, A. (2018). The Years (A. L. Strayer, Trans.). London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Lorenzer, A. (2006). Szenisches Verstehen. Zur Erkenntnis des Unbewußten. Band II. (pp. 13–39). Marburg: Tectum.
